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Documentation/Maemo 5 Developer Guide/Architecture/Changes

The Maemo 5 platform software is based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. While Debian provides a significant amount of our current code base, it also defines policies for build process, packaging, file system hierarchy and other processes.
The intention is to follow current Debian code and processes as closely as possible, and deviate only when it is required due to technical or legal reasons. Differences between Debian and our policies and practices are documented in Packaging/Guidelines.

New Bluetooth chip driver introduced which supports BT2.1 configuration, which implies that mandatory BT2.1 features are added to the kernel and userspace BlueZ stack.

WLAN architecture is changed to use the Linux mac80211 framework, which means that the closed source WLAN UMAC component in the kernel is removed and the new WLAN kernel implementation is fully open source.

Clutter introduced to access the hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics functionality. It is assumed that we have only one OpenGL drawing context and thus a single process running in the system is using clutter at a time. This process is hildon-desktop.

gpsd replaced by liblocation API library and a set of on-request daemon processes for different location methods (Eg: gypsy-daemon for bluetooth GPS, location daemon for integrated GPS and network based methods)

calendar-backend is a new component that provides a C++ calendar API for external applications. It interacts with SQlite database, implements the iCal RFC to store the calendar entries and handles the database transactions.

The Media Application Framework (MAFW) provides an open, flexible and extensible layer that eases the development of multimedia applications for the Maemo platform. It is a complement to the Multimedia framework that has been heavily improved in Fremantle. MAFW provides:

An extendable, pluggable framework interface, which allows to develop new plugins that provide integration with new multimedia services or rendering engines, that can be seamlessly integrated in all MAFW based applications.
Easy to use APIs that speed up application developing, providing support for playback control, discovery and browsing of multimedia resources and playlist manipulation.
Independence of the technology. Since MAFW is a plugin based framework, it is not tied to a particular multimedia technology (GStreamer, MPlayer, Tracker). Plugin developers have freedom to choose the technologies they want to use in their plugins, and application developers do not need to know about them.